About this Book
This book will introduce you to building reactive web applications using the Scala programming language, the Play Framework, and the Akka concurrency toolkit. The Play Framework is now a very popular web framework on the JVM, but few projects take full advantage of its strength and take the necessary steps to make a web application reactive. That’s because the steps involved aren’t obvious, nor are the advantages. Similarly, Akka is a technology that many developers know of, but they don’t always know how to employ it in their projects. This book aims to remedy this situation by showing how these technologies can be used in practice and in combination. The book introduces the conceptual foundation for asynchronous, reactive programming using futures and actors, and it demonstrates how you can configure an application and integrate other technologies to build real-life projects.
To get the most out of this book, you should be a seasoned programmer and be well acquainted with at least one modern language such as Java or C#. Furthermore, you should know enough about the syntax and main concepts of Scala to read the examples in the book and implement the exercises. Knowledge of functional programming isn’t required but is of advantage. Appendix B contains a list of references that you can use to get up to speed with Scala and functional programming.
